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Custom Orders: An Experiment

Design A Wallet

At Maker Faire, we’ll give customers the opportunity to design their own wallet.

Whenever we do a show there are at least a few people who ask us for something we don’t currently make. From time to time these interactions lead to a custom order.

At their best, custom orders are pretty cool. They can provide an opportunity to experiment with new design elements, materials, or ‘interesting’ color combinations. We’ve been lucky to have some pretty awesome customers who are great to work with. We’ll highlight some of our favorite custom orders in a future blog post.

Custom orders can also be challenging. They are almost always more time-consuming than a standard order. There may be some product testing involved with a new design or you may need to source and acquire new materials. You also need to confirm with the customer that you’ve correctly interpreted their request. This can involve several rounds of communication.

On rare occasions, you may even need to politely turn down a custom request. We’ve learned that if the project isn’t a good fit – for whatever reason – it’s in everyone’s best interest to bow out gracefully.

So, with a slight bit of trepidation, we are planning an experiment for our booth with Bazaar Bizarre at Maker Faire on May 18-19: We’ll be offering folks the opportunity to design their own wallet based on our standard seatbelt wallet.

Interior of our standard billfold wallet

Customers will choose the webbing and interior pocket colors. They will also have the option to add a coin pocket, ID window, and/or chain attachment. We’ll be setting aside a special section of the booth with webbing and pocket samples for people to experiment with.

Here is a small selection of available webbing options.

Here are some of the color options for the wallet interior.

We’re hoping that limiting the ‘Design A Wallet’ options will simplify the customization process. We’re really curious about whether offering a custom version of our wallet will make people more (or less) likely to ask for other types of customization. We are still planning to take custom requests for other products. And if the display causes unnecessary confusion, we’re completely prepared to dismantle it on the spot. Gracefully, of course.